The long-awaited drama Vault, based on the audacious 1975 robbery of the Hudson Bonded Vault company in PVD, a private safe-deposit company used by big-time criminals to store their loot under the protection of organized crime, opens to the public June 7 for a RI sneak preview at Showcase cinemas in Providence and Warwick (the […]
Abundance by Michael Fine (320 pages, PM Press, published May 1, 2019). Doctors among warriors occupy an unusual position in society, witness to much yet trusted and expected to respect confidences. The character Doc Daneeka in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1961, defines the title that has become a standard idiom of American English. MASH: A […]
Set during “a 24-hour period, during the summer of 1955” in “a small you-never-heard-of-it town somewhere in the Midwest,” All Shook Up is a jukebox musical based on recognizable and familiar songs from the Elvis Presley era that is ideal for a fun date night. It’s a light-hearted, upbeat story of small-town romance that plays […]
Whether non-fiction books are entitled to the same sales tax exemption as fiction books is a dispute that has been simmering for years, resulting in a federal civil rights lawsuit filed Tuesday, May 7, by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of the Association of Rhode Island Authors (ARIA) and three of its […]
The Last Night of Ballyhoo is the second installment of the “Atlanta trilogy” by playwright Alfred Uhry, all of which are set among the Jewish community of the American South in the early part of the 20th Century. Ballyhoo won the 1997 Tony Award for Best Play and is the only comedy of the trilogy. […]
Polaroid Stories by playwright Naomi Iizuka is a clever attempt to link a modern story of street life with the timeless literature of the ancient world, employing a loose – extremely loose – adaptation of The Metamorphoses by Ovid, but somewhere between 8CE and 1997CE things really changed. The two writers share similar personal histories: […]
Anecdotal second-hand reports of tattoos or piercings causing problems for employees or prospective employees are common, but Motif was unable to find any labor lawyer who had been approached on the issue: It simply has not come up, several said. This is not evidence of an absence of incidents, just that hardly anyone has waved […]
The new original play Me Three: A Guide to New Beginnings by Lenny Schwartz could charitably be described as genre-defying, swinging between farce and serious social critique, or less charitably as careening wildly from one random thing to another. What could be a passable magical-realist comedy – the advertising describes it as “darkly funny and […]
The Jewish holiday of Passover (Pesach) begins in 2019 at sunset (7:30pm in Providence) on Friday, April 19, commemorating the central defining event in Jewish history, the biblical Exodus about 3,300 years ago, during which the Jewish people escaped from slavery in Egypt and began the process of establishing a national identity on their own […]
We caught up with local cannabis activist Bobby Nuggz (fb.com/bobby.nuggz) at the March 7 grand opening of the Arctic Smoke Shop on Main Street in West Warwick. Michael Bilow (Motif): Let me get your thoughts on the cannabis situation right now. What do you think is the highest priority? Bobby Nuggz: With the legalization bill? MB: […]